Various types of systems for communicating and interacting with a remote audience are known in the prior art. Such systems aim to broadcast information from a central point to a plurality of audience members at remote locations, and also aim to allow those audience members to each communicate back to the central broadcast location. In a radio station environment, for example, a disc jockey announces a contest sponsored by the radio station over the air. That announcement is transmitted via the radio station's radio transmitter at a predetermined radio frequency, such as an FM or AM broadcast channel. Each of the audience members receives that broadcast via a radio, which is tuned to the predetermined radio frequency. To communicate back to the central broadcast point, audience members are typically invited to use a telephone to call in to the radio station's switchboard. For example, the ubiquitous statement from a radio station “be caller number X to win free tickets” to some event is known and popular in the prior art.
In responding to the invitation from the central broadcast point, audience members use a telephone to dial a predetermined contact telephone number of the radio station. Because this system relies on existing telephone technology, it has certain inherent disadvantages. For example, the number of audience members who can participate at any given time is limited by the number of telephone connections of the radio station. If the station has only three telephone lines, then only three audience members may participate at any time. Some systems allow for multiple audience members to be connected to a single telephone line, i.e., to be in a standard FIFO queue while waiting for the attention of the human operator of the line which is typically the disc jockey or an assistant. However, such systems are still limited by the number of participants who may wait in the queue. For example, a radio station with four telephone lines, each with a queue of ten positions, still only has a capacity for forty audience members to participate at any given time.
Some broadcast stations allow for audience members to participate via the internet. Typically, that interaction is provided through a website, which allows the user to submit electronic mail to the operators of the central broadcast station. However, that system suffers from the disadvantage of the requirement that the operators of the central station respond to each electronic mail individually. Moreover, that system requires audience members to have access to an electronic mail system at the time the station broadcasts its invitation for communication from audience members. This necessarily limits the number of mobile audience members who can participate.
The present invention is provided to solve the problems discussed above and other problems, and to provide advantages and aspects not provided by prior communication systems of this type. A full discussion of the features and advantages of the present invention is deferred to the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.